The Messenger of Magnolia Street

by River Jordan

  Monday, 4:58 P.M.

  Cassie Getty has watched her sister drive by on the road without even a nod or a wave. Sister might be a clone by now, she thinks. That’s just what a clone would do. Drive right on by like they don’t even know their own sister. She pulls out a suitcase left over from her trip to California in the fifties. All the way to the Pacific and back again. She had once thought about writing a book and naming it just that. To the Pacific and Back Again. But she didn’t. She couldn’t think of another line besides the title and that had slowed her down some. And she couldn’t think of anything great to say about the experience except she had gone there and had come back. It looked like the end of the world to her, but nobody wanted to hear about that. She had been trying all of her life to warn people about the world ending one way or another, and it hadn’t gotten her anything but ridicule. Well, she thinks, any fool can look outside and tell this is the end. They don’t need me for that today. Should’ve listened to me while they still had time. But a fool and his minutes will be parted right down the middle. Cut sideways and crossways. Minced moments till nothing is left. I tried to tell them, she thinks, but now it’s too late. Cassie Getty sits down in her rocker and waits for time to stop completely. She wonders what will be her last thought, or if there will even be one. If there will just be the sound of her rocker on the wood floor, the sound of back and forth, back and forth, finally replaced by the sound of nothing. Nothing at all.

  Monday, 5:16 P.M.

  Magnus has made her way to the square. She pauses long enough to spit through her fingers. She looks absently around the square and crosses the road to the oak tree. Once she reaches it, she lays one hand up against the trunk and says, “I’m here,” as if she had struggled a million miles. “I finally made it.” It is the oak tree she is addressing. Then she sits down on the bench, sticks her worn boots out in front of her, and waits.

  Across the square behind the oak tree, Kate is looking out the window. She had been concentrating on Butch, who hasn’t moved an inch in a very long time, but when she catches sight of Magnus walking through the square and plopping down at the oak tree, that sparks her thoughts in another direction. I’ve got to tell her, she says to herself. And without another word, she places the phone back in its cradle and walks out from behind the cash register and, still wearing her apron, out the front door.

  Butch releases a deep breath he’s been holding in and pulls out his cell phone. He presses one to speed-dial the senator’s direct line, but instead of the sure and steady voice of the senator, a recording begins to say, “Due to circumstances beyond our control,” and Butch hangs up. “Out of control all right.” He walks over to the phone behind the counter and picks it up, but when he puts the phone to his ear, there is no dial tone. He taps the receiver button. No change. He hangs up the receiver, waits, and lifts the receiver and tries again. No change. He looks out the window at the blackening red and thinks, The senator’s not going to like this. Then he looks out the window to make certain that Kate is not on the return and turns toward the kitchen, where he hopes to find another piece of chicken. And another piece of pie. Maybe two. And then he forgets the reason he came to Shibboleth in the first place.

  Monday, 5:20 P.M.

  If you could look at Shibboleth today from a hawk’s eye, you might see some of the leftover patterns. But they have already begun to disappear. Gardens are unattended. Nothing has been watered. Nothing raked. Nothing broken, fixed, and put together again. Little by little, people have been drying up at the root. Death and dry rot running up the stems of their souls. They are not waving when they pass anymore. Babies are not being coddled but dismissed. Or overlooked altogether, as though no one really saw them. Stories are not being told. Laughter is not being heard. Wishes are not being made. The music of the life of the people of Shibboleth has been sucked away. Most of them are as empty as locust shells now. Vaguely familiar shapes holding no substance.

  Monday, 5:33 P.M.

  “What are you doing out here?” Kate is standing over Magnus with her hands on her hips.

  Magnus spits between the V of her fingers. “Danged if I know, Kate.” She looks up at Kate and shades her eyes with her hand as if the sun were in her eyes. But there is no sun now. “What are you doing out here?”

  Kate sits down next to her on the bench. “Danged if I know, Magnus.”

  And the two of them just sit. As if this were their ritual. As if they had sat on this bench through all the girlhood days and glory days and days gone by. And once upon a time, they did.

  “It sure is quiet,” Magnus says.

  Kate offers her, “Yeah, looks like some kind of storm is coming.”

  “Have you seen this kind of storm before?” Magnus paws the dirt with one heel of her boot, then answers without waiting for Kate Ann to reply. “I have. I’ve seen it. It took me a while to remember where. Took me a lot of steps to remember when, but when I got here, when I laid my hands on that tree,” she shoots her thumb over her shoulder at the oak, “it all came back to me. But it was funny, like looking through one of those glass-bottom boats I saw one time in Florida. You can’t touch what you’re seeing. And a part of you just wants to get out of the boat and not to drown.” She spits again. “It’s unnatural, that ride.”

  “What are you saying, Magnus?” Kate is shaking her head back and forth, trying to wake up. She is hearing Magnus’s words from a long way off. The truth is, Kate isn’t really certain if she is awake or dreaming that she and Magnus are whispering under the covers of a dream. Kate looks down at her hands, still flecked and sticky with flour dough. Must not be a dream, she thinks, if my hands are this sticky. “Go on.”

  “It was the night that Blister got burned.” She turns and looks at Kate, reaches out and takes her sticky hands. “That night, I had a dream, and in the dream was this,” she waves her hand at the dried-up town, the stores, and the fear breathing down on them from the air, “and I woke up afraid, Kate. Everybody was leaving town, and whether they go’ed or whether they stayed made no difference, they were all leaving for good.”

  Kate lets go with one hand and reaches out and pushes Magnus’s gray hair back. She’s too young for all this gray hair, she thinks. Isn’t she? Lord, how old are we now? When did this happen?

  “And this is what I knew,” she has started to whisper. “If Blister died that night, we all died. And that makes no sense at all. What’s an old drunk got to do with the end of the world, anyway?” And one tear slides down Magnus’s worry-lined face.

  “Blister’s all right.” And Kate looks around the square at the stores with no one in them. The open signs gleaming like lies from the windows. The old PURE station sign as dead as Randy Johnson since he passed away. Now everyone had to drive five whole miles out of town to the convenience store to get gas, and Kate didn’t think there was anything convenient about it. “Can’t even get gas downtown anymore.” Kate has forgotten about Blister, barely remembers that Magnus is holding onto her hands.

  “See here, Kate, Trice saw what was happening at the minute in her dream, but she was still living with you so I didn’t know we were both dreaming. Both seeing. I was seeing what was happening today.” She looks around like Kate at the neon in the windows, the open signs and open doors. And empty buildings. “This is what I saw. The empty streets and stores. The people all sucked away. It was just as horrible then as it is now. Only…Blister was in my dream and he was all twisted up. Inside and out. And I kept saying, ‘Get up, John,’ and I called him John ’cause that’s his name, of course. ‘Get up!’ Over and over I kept saying it, but the funny thing was that he wasn’t down. He was standing empty-handed in front of me. Just standing there, and he kept saying, ‘What do you want me to do, Magnus?’ Then he’d shove those empty hands in front of my face and say, ‘This is all I got.’ And I would say to him again, ‘Get up!’ and that’s all I ever said.” She takes Kate’s other hand, squeezes both of them hard. “That’s the first time I ever told anybody about
that dream. It has haunted me bad all these years. So bad sometimes I have a dream about the dream. And all I know is Blister was supposed to do something but dang me Kate if I know what it was. But I know this. It’s the doggone reason he’s still alive and if Blister doesn’t figure it out…” Magnus lets her voice trail off and her mouth fall open as Blister’s red Chevy appears in the distance, approaching them like a torpedo from the past. And the clock slows down so much you can audibly hear it ticking. It is keeping time with their heartbeats.

  Monday, 5:53 P.M.

  Blister has driven now for hours. Driven up and down all the back roads of Shibboleth. And he still doesn’t know who he’s looking for or why, but he’s certain that he needs to remember something because it’s important. “Critical,” he says aloud to no one listening but you and me.

  He has driven to the east side of Shibboleth. He has driven to the west side of Shibboleth. He has driven downtown and is now circling the square. Well look-a there. You don’t see that anymore. Women just sitting under the oak tree. He drives around the circle again. Boy, they sure do look kinda familiar. He slows down to a crawl and drives around a third time. And then his eyes lock with the Mighty Magnus and something explodes inside his brain. It is the past, present, and future all meeting in the same moment. And he knows what he has to do. And that he has to do it. And without further notice, he floors the Chevy, drives full speed on around the square and on down the road.

  “He didn’t even wave,” Kate says. She would have waved, but Magnus had such a tight grip on her hands that she couldn’t move one. “Just like he was a stranger to us.”

  “He’s no stranger,” Magnus says.

  “Well, of course not. Everybody knows Blister.”

  “His name is John Elias Robert.” She peels back seven layers of her skin as she reveals, “and he is the father of my baby.”

  Kate’s head turns quickly toward the receding red truck. “I never would have guessed it.” And then she says quietly, “John Robert is her daddy, then. All these years I wondered but I was afraid to ask.”

  “Who’d you think?”

  Kate shrugs. “Maybe the old Debbie Cake salesman. They seem to be good at sweeping women off their feet.”

  “Kate Ann, does she ever ask about herself?” Magnus is crying now, but it’s a silent cry. The tears stream down her face as she talks. She doesn’t wipe them away. She doesn’t let go of Kate’s hands. “Don’t she wonder about how she came to be in this world?”

  Kate, her big blue eyes floating in saltwater, replies, “She asked when she was little. For no reason, because she had me and Phillip for momma and daddy. There weren’t no reason for her to be asking. But she was eyeing me with those blue eyes.”

  “You know something funny? She’s got those blue eyes like yours.”

  “Well, God’s got a sense of humor, I reckon. But she kept eyeing me funny. I’d catch her out of the corner of my eye. Like she knew from the beginning I come by her in an extraordinary way. And she’d ask me every few months until I finally told her she was a gift from God. A bona fide miracle. That I raised her up from the wishing well.”

  “And she believed it.” Magnus doesn’t say it with a question mark in her voice. She says it with a smile.

  “She’s Trice. She believes in miracles, Magnus.”

  “That’s ’cause she is one.” Magnus finally releases Kate’s hands, stretches both palms out and wipes her face flat.

  “Well, she is to everybody that knows her.” Kate straightens her apron, pushes the hair back from her eyes.

  “And we don’t ever need to tell her any different, Kate. Just let things go on being the way they are.” But then she looks up at the sky and remembers the way things are. “Or maybe the way things used to be.”

  “We’ve kept that secret a long time, haven’t we, Magnus?” Magnus nods. Kate looks up at the oak tree branches. “And just to think, it all started right here with us working out the details. Remember?” Magnus nods. “We were young.”

  “Not so young. Not me anyway. I was already an old maid—thirty-five and done for. You were a little younger. Young but already strong.”

  “I was married. Let’s not forget that. Made it easier for me to be strong.”

  “I was so scared,” Magnus says, and looks off somewhere over Kate’s shoulder as if she could see the whole thing. The conversation on the bench. That long bus ride. That year away.

  “You were scared back then. I’ve been scared ever since.”

  Magnus looks at her in surprise. “What have you got to be scared of? You don’t look like you’d be scared of the devil.”

  Kate Ann looks over the empty streets again. “Scared of losing her, Magnus. All of her life, I’ve been scared of losing her.”

  “Me too,” says Magnus, “losing her to you.” And the two of them, tired and turning gray, somehow manage to cross that long, decayed, invisible bridge to one another. And to hold on.

  Monday, 6:14 P.M.

  Old Blue pulls up at the south entrance of the springs. This time they have left the shotgun at home. Shotguns won’t make a bit of a difference in this fight. They could bring in grenade launchers, tanks, and troops to no avail. It’s not that kind of battle.

  Nehemiah looks up at the sky with Billy watching him. Maybe he’s gonna call down that rain. Maybe that will help us. So he asks him. Figures it can’t hurt.

  “You gonna call down that invisible rain, Nehemiah?”

  Nehemiah continues looking at the sky. “No, Billy,” he says. “We’re past that rain now. We need to hurry.”

  The three of them begin to walk through the rough sand pines, the scrub oaks and underbrush, occasionally a magnolia is to the left or right, and Trice notices that the blooms that should be just coming out, just exploding into white, are withered and brown. The smell of sulfur grows stronger, and with every step their footsteps crunch and crackle. It is the sound of dry, dry, dry. They are approaching the cave from a different entrance. They are trying to go in at a different level. Come up in a different room. They are trying to take a shortcut. But sometimes shortcuts are deceptively long and treacherous.

  I look at Billy’s stomach, at his shoulders. I am thinking it’s not going to be a tight squeeze—it’s going to be impossible. But they don’t know this yet. They have forgotten that time’s natural passing means growing up in more ways than one.

  “Where’s the wind, Nehemiah?” Billy asks. Trice keeps a hand on Nehemiah’s hand, his arm, his jacket. She is holding on. And silent. She doesn’t want to tell them now what she sees. And what she doesn’t see.

  “I can’t tell you, Billy.” Nehemiah shifts his pack.

  “I don’t understand this,” Billy says, “and I don’t like it, either. This is downright suspicious. Like if we were expecting the wind, we won’t find it, so something else is gonna come up.” Billy looks around and whispers under his breath, “Something else that’s no good.”

  Nehemiah begins to contemplate Billy’s something else with each step. Watching the ground, watching the trees, watching the sky. What he wants to say is, Brother, I got a bad feeling. A curious feeling. One that says we’re not gonna make it out of here alive. And then he stops, pulls up short because what he sees is a different set of tracks. He looks down at his boots and they’re a different pair of boots. As if the tracks and the footsteps belong to another man from a long time ago. In a jungle a long way away. And he realizes this feeling is not his feeling. It is his father’s feeling. The second to the last feeling he would ever have as he walked straight into the middle of nothing but a heavy silence. A red sky. With no visible enemy. And with no return. His final words, “Get down!” were shouted just before an ambush of enemy fire opened up from all sides and land mines began to explode as men tried to take cover. And David Trust’s final thoughts had not actually been complete thoughts at all. Only images. Images of the face of the woman he had always loved and the two small faces that would grow into men’s faces without h
im. And any closing prayer he had that day was simply Dear God, and it was attached to those faces just before he laid down his life. He hung those two words on those faces, and then he died.

  And in an inexplicable folding-over of time and fruit from one of the shortest prayers ever heard, Nehemiah says, Get down! but then he realizes he has said the words to himself. “Get down!” This time he forces the words over his lips as he reaches for Trice and pulls her down with him. It appears that finally, after so many years of being wrong, Cassie Getty has gotten something right. As far as Shibboleth is concerned, the end of the world has come.

  Monday, 6:24 P.M.

  Kate and Magnus are embracing. Right out there in public. Sitting right there, on the bench. Out in the open under that unrelenting black-red sky. Rocking one another back and forth. It’s too bad that it had to come down to the end for this to happen. It would have been a glory for Zadok to see and point it out to the men in the barbershop. They would have all said, “I’ll be” and “Would you look at that!” If Cassie Getty had been coming out of the beauty shop after her regular appointment, she would have just looked backward one time through the open door and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Hell has just froze over. Thought y’all would like to know.” Ellen over at the Piggly Wiggly would have gotten on the intercom and called up Rudy from the back and said, “You just got to get up here and see this.” But that isn’t the case on this day. And in only seven seconds, a shock wave will roll down the street and knock Magnus and Kate back so hard that the bench they are sitting on will carve a permanent notch into the oak tree. It will hit them both as they cling to one another knowing that at least now they can stop worrying about their big secret. Because the big secret will die with them.